Diary

Igrew up​ in the seaside town of Prestwick, on the West Coast of Scotland. In its heyday, Prestwick was a haven for workers from the shipyards and factories, who would travel ‘doon the watter’ by paddle steamer or train for the Glasgow Fair, the fortnight in July when all the city’s industries shut down. At one end of the promenade stood the bathing lake: an Olympic standard open-air swimming pool, the biggest in Scotland, with a copper dome, colonnaded pavilion and high diving board. Three thousand spectators could look down on galas, diving exhibitions and fireworks displays from its stone amphitheatre. There were also beauty contests, with girls in bikinis and white stilettos parading in front of men in suits and their wives in fake pearls and cat eye sunglasses.

At night, the bustle switched to the town centre. The Picture House, known as the bug hut, was built in the silver screen rush of the 1920s and offered cheap seats on backless steel benches. The 1060-seater Broadway, which opened in April 1935, was more upmarket. Designed by Alister MacDonald, son of Ramsay, it had pink and yellow carpets and ceiling vents decorated with gold camels. Between the wars, Glasgow had the largest number of cinema seats per capita in Europe. The Broadway’s first manager, W.V. Gillgan, fed the hunger for escape by transforming the cinema foyer for each new movie. For Cherry Kearton’s Big Game of Life, he shipped in a selection of stuffed animals, including an alligator and ‘two fine species of monkey’. ‘Mr Gillgan caused considerable amusement,’ the Kinematograph Weekly reported, ‘by placing a large bone – borrowed from a nearby butcher – in the gaping jaws of the alligator.’ For Albert Rogell’s Air Hawks, the vestibule was filled with an ‘impressive array of valves, switches, coils [and] transformers’ and the doormen were dressed in flying kit. ‘Fourteen instructors and eleven of the ground staff of the newly opened Prestwick Flying School witnessed the show as guests of the management.’

The Picture House closed in 1957 and the Broadway in 1966 (though there was a short-lived attempt to revive it a decade later). By the time I was old enough to visit, the bathing lake had been turned into a seal sanctuary. Glaswegians went to Prestwick to catch jets taking them abroad. In 1972, the year the swimming pool closed, my family followed the herd to Majorca. The Broadway was converted into a bingo hall, then a squash court and amusement arcade. I spent hours pushing coins into the penny falls, until in 1984, the year I turned seventeen and UK cinema attendances hit rock bottom, I moved to Glasgow.

But my mother still lives in Prestwick, so I noticed when posters went up on the disused Broadway building, charting attempts to restore it as a working cinema. Last year, Friends of the Broadway Prestwick, which had secured a grant to bring the building into community ownership, opened the foyer to the public. The octagonal ticket booth was still standing, gift-wrapped in chrome ribbons. The project development officer, Kyle Macfarlane, pointed out to me the red and black Art Deco floor that had been hidden beneath a damp grey carpet and deciphered the mysterious indentations as marks made by high heels. Behind a cordon, I glimpsed the bottom of a grand staircase. Macfarlane explained that while the stalls had been converted into squash courts and the foyer into an amusement arcade, the balcony, café and projection room had been sealed since the cinema showed its last film – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – in November 1976.

When Gary Painter and Gordon Barr, who run the Scottish Cinemas and Theatres website, were allowed into the building in 2005, two years after the leisure centre closed, it seemed as if ‘the projectionists had simply thrown dust sheets over the projectors and closed the doors.’ The letters that had once spelled out ‘BROADWAY’ on the façade were stacked in a corner and there was a huge pile of documents – letters, bills, film listings, accounts – in the projectionists’ office. They asked the owner, a local hospitality company called Buzzworks, if they could keep the documents, and bundled them into Gary’s car.

Buzzworks was hoping to turn the Broadway into a hotel and nightclub. But planning permission was refused and the building lay empty until five years ago, when the company was approached by Friends of the Broadway. Buzzworks gave the group a licence to occupy the building and a six-figure discount on the selling price. In April 2023, Friends of the Broadway became the legal occupants of the building. Weather and vandals had taken their toll, but the firm commissioned to undertake the restoration work, Burrell Foley Fischer (BFF), says that with adequate funding the building could be returned to its original pomp.

BFF has already restored the Picture House in Campbeltown, a rare example of an ‘atmospheric cinema’, designed to replicate the experience of watching a film outside. The hazy clouds drifting across its ceiling have been repainted and the plasterwork houses on either side of the proscenium repaired. ‘The Campbeltown Picture House was 80 per cent intact,’ BFF’s managing director, Faye Davies, told me. ‘The Broadway is in a worse state. There have been some detrimental interventions [such as the building of the squash courts] … and there has been damage to the fabric of the building through water ingress … luckily there is plenty of documentation to tell us how it once looked.’ The cinema’s two 35mm Gaumont-Kalee Type 20 projectors, abandoned in situ when the cinema closed, are in good enough condition to be returned to use, alongside a modern digital projector.

Alister MacDonald inherited his father’s pacifism and spent the later part of the First World War as an orderly in northern France. After the war he studied architecture in London and then took a job as a clerk of works at the Plaza Paramount in Piccadilly, which had ornate Renaissance-style plasterwork and a Wurlitzer organ. The Plaza opened in 1926, the year before The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length film with synchronised speech, came out (as Al Jolson says, ‘You ain’t heard nothin’ yet’). MacDonald realised that talkies were the next big thing and in 1930 went to research buildings and sound insulation in New York and LA. There is a photograph of him with Charlie Chaplin, both dressed in dinner suits, their foreheads almost touching as they share a joke, and another with Mary Pickford that made the front cover of the Tatler.

MacDonald went on to design picture houses all over the UK, including the ‘news cinemas’ in Victoria and Waterloo stations. He died in 1993. Surprisingly little has been written about him, and what there is focuses on his role in the St Paul’s Watch, a group of volunteers who protected the cathedral from bombing raids during the Blitz. Only one of the cinemas he designed is still showing films: the Moray Playhouse in Elgin, which opened in 1932. You can still see the hallmarks of MacDonald’s style: a stepped ceiling with circular house lights surrounded by petals; fluted shell-shaped lights cascading from ceramic foliage, each one smaller than the last, like drops of water shooting skywards. The Broadway, which opened three years later, was given a symmetrical Art Deco façade, with a recessed three-storey tower flanked by gracefully curved two-storey wings. Doors at the back of the foyer led to the rear stalls, with a grand staircase on the right ascending to the balcony. Wall lights brightened the dark wood panelling of the lower walls and made the gold flecks on the upper walls sparkle. To the right of the upstairs foyer was the café, its windows looking over Main Street through the central tower. On its inside wall was a hand-painted scroll featuring the famous couplet from ‘To a Louse’ by Robert Burns: ‘O wad some power the giftie gie us/To see oursels as ithers see us.’

The documents Barr and Painter rescued from the Broadway are now in the Moving Image Archive in Glasgow’s Kelvin Hall, once the home of the city’s annual carnival and circus and later its transport museum. My children’s favourite part of the museum was the recreation of a cobbled 1938 street, complete with fruit store, fashion outfitter, fishmonger, pub and a Regal cinema. Most of these were just shopfronts, but you could walk into the Regal, ‘buy’ a ticket and take a seat in front of a small screen. The transport museum has since been rehoused and the Kelvin Hall is a strange combination of leisure centre and museum collections. When I visited in March, three large folders were waiting for me on a trolley. The earliest documents are from 1939. In July, the Broadway manager James Ross received a letter about the Landlord and Tenant War Damage Act, which laid out the rights of those whose premises were hit by enemy action. Soon, the projectionists left to fight, returning to their positions when the war ended.

In August 1947 there was a visit from the Hollywood star Vivian Blaine. Ross spent £1 2/- on streamers and £3 15/- on hiring a van and loud hailer for three days. Blaine sent advance notice that ‘no autographs will be given.’ The following year the Eldorado Ice Cream company wrote to say it had been forced to adjust its allocation of ‘Happicups’ due to the continuing shortage of ingredients. The thrift of the era is evident in the number of customers filing claims for dresses torn by nails on the seats.

In the 1950s, the Broadway flourished and the films became more daring. Movies shown include Adam and Eve – Christiane Martel’s hair was only just long enough to cover her nipples – and She Demons, in which scantily clad women, this time with fangs, were again laying waste to a (tropical) paradise. Yet in 1959 the manager was warned by head office that ‘under no circumstances’ should an advertisement titled ‘A Happy Family Is a Planned Family’ be shown.

The logs charting the movies screened and takings received become increasingly despondent through the 1960s. ‘We are getting too many British films at the weekend,’ an entry from December 1961 records: Scottish audiences preferred American films. Later that year, the managing director sent a list of forthcoming attractions to offset rumours that the Broadway was about to close. ‘I would suggest you get a large board made to announce to your patrons that you have these films coming.’ But the decline continued. In October 1964: ‘Goldfinger showing at the Odeon in Ayr and our business suffered accordingly.’ By then, Mondays and Tuesdays had been given over to bingo; and in 1966 the Broadway’s days as a cinema were over.

My own moviegoing began in the Ayr Odeon, the more upmarket of the town’s two remaining cinemas. It was there I saw my first film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. In those days, the Odeon had one screen. A few years after I left for university, it was split into three smaller screens and a few years later a fourth was added. The cinema staggered on through Covid, then shut in June 2023, before opening in March this year as the Astoria (part of a small group of cinemas, mainly in former holiday destinations). Its 1970s rival, the Orient, became a bingo hall in 1983, and then a nightclub, but has been empty for more than a decade.

Cliff Baillie grew up in Ayr, where his parents had a bed and breakfast. In the summer, he would be sent to stay with his grandparents in Helensburgh. They ran the town’s cinema, La Scala, and Baillie spent most of his evenings watching the movies. After his grandparents retired in the 1970s, he continued hanging around the Odeon on Saturdays, the day the film billings were changed. ‘I got talking to the doorman who introduced me to the manager,’ Baillie told me. ‘In those days, the films’ titles were advertised in big letters which hung from bars on the front of the canopy. Soon, I was holding the ladder as the lettering was changed, and not long after that, I was up the ladder and changing it myself.’

In the 1970s and 1980s, Rank and ABC had a duopoly on film distribution. The Odeon was owned by Rank and showed only Rank releases, while the Orient showed films released by ABC. This meant the Odeon got Star Wars, for example, while the Orient got Grease. Though cinemas benefited from the fact that it took five years for a new film to be shown on television, there was a strict pecking order. ‘Everyone thinks Star Wars came out in 1977,’ Baillie said. ‘In the US it came out in May 1977, but in Britain it was released on 26 December 1977, when it was shown in two London cinemas. In January 1978, it was shown in the big Scottish cities. Ayr finally got it in April.’

When Baillie turned sixteen, the manager offered him a summer job, then a weekend job, then a full-time job. With cinema on the slide, even his grandparents cautioned him against taking it. Too late. Baillie watched as cinemas across the country became sports centres or wedding venues, while those that remained were chopped up into smaller screens, often on the cheap. ‘That’s what happened in Ayr,’ he told me. ‘They simply dropped a wall from the circle downwards and then divided what they had behind that into two more cinemas. There was no soundproofing: you could quite often hear the film in the neighbouring auditorium.’

Cinema visits bottomed out at 54 million in 1984 (they had peaked at 1.6 billion in 1946). The following year, the US company AMC opened the UK’s first purpose-built multiplex, in Milton Keynes. By then the duopoly was over. In the next decade, the number of screens in the UK rose by around five hundred, and cinema attendances to almost a hundred million. The new multiplexes were often found in out-of-town shopping centres. The selling points were obvious: increased choice, better snacks and superior technology. Many of the smaller cinemas didn’t survive the arrival of these monoliths. Yet, ‘even in the 1990s, there was over-saturation, with too many companies setting up in the same places and fighting for a finite market,’ according to Baillie. ‘And while an old traditional cinema might be on land it owned or leased at a very low price, the multiplexes had signed up to 25-year leases on prime sites.’ Technology was moving quickly, with better home TVs, DVD players, and then laptops and streaming services. To lure customers from their armchairs required cinemas to become much cheaper – and so appeal to the young – or to offer something more luxurious, closer to the exoticism of the earliest cinemas. Everyman cinemas, with sofas and table service, started appearing across the country in the early 2000s, forcing struggling Odeons to reduce capacity, introduce recliner seats and call themselves Odeon Luxe.

Baillie stopped working for Odeon in 2015. Before the pandemic, he managed the Parkway Beverley, one of a small chain of independent cinemas in Yorkshire. The key, he said, was to know your audience. ‘While your youth would go to see the latest blockbuster at the flashy Cineworld six miles down the road, the older local population would flock to the Parkway for Belfast or Poor Things or Wicked Little Letters.’ In 2007, Parkway restored a derelict cinema in Barnsley. A thirteen-screen Cineworld opened across the road in 2022, but the Parkway has survived so far. ‘With Ghostbusters, they thought: “It’s an old building, let’s offer a Ghostbuster tour before the movie,” and it sold out,’ Baillie said. ‘People are faithful to them because they are seen as part of the town.’

Several other Art Deco cinemas were restored around the same time, including the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle, the Hippodrome in Bo’ness and the Birks in Aberfeldy. These projects have dual roles: to preserve a piece of civic history and offer something to the community. Many of them look to their heritage for inspiration. The Hippodrome in Bo’ness, for example, runs an annual silent film festival with musicians providing accompaniment. The nostalgia that fuelled the vinyl revival has also fuelled a resurgence of interest in analogue film, which some of these cinemas are able to show on their old projectors. Such is the interest in older forms that even some new films, such as Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, are being released on 70 mm film.

It’s difficult to quantify the economic impact of local independent cinemas, but in 2016 a report by Regional Screen Scotland found that on a typical night, 78 per cent of customers would spend £12 or more at the venue or in the vicinity, while 37 per cent would spend more than £20. When Covid arrived, independent cinemas were eligible for government bailouts, while the multiplexes – with their long, expensive leases – were not. Then, as the pandemic eased, the Hollywood writers’ strike began, leaving multiplexes without enough movies to fill their screens. Cineworld went through bankruptcy proceedings in the US to restructure its debt; AMC is hovering on the brink. The independent sector was affected too. Some have lowered prices; the Edinburgh Filmhouse closed in 2022, although it hopes to reopen next year. But new independents continue to open and venerable buildings to be renovated: the Electric Palace in Harwich, the UK’s oldest cinema, which opened in 1911 (and closed in 1956), and Leeds Hyde Park Picture House both reopened recently after major restoration work. The Strand in Belfast is currently undergoing a £6.5 million refurbishment and there are plans to restore the Art Deco Auchterarder Picturehouse.

One bright May morning, I took a walk along Prestwick’s Main Street with Hugh Hunter, an independent councillor. Hunter moved to the town from Glasgow in 1986 when it was at its lowest ebb. Things are better now: the esplanade has been resurfaced and though there is a spattering of vacant sites, the café and restaurants are busy. Wright’s, an independent hardware shop, has been trading since 1947. The park beside Prestwick Cross is as neatly landscaped and vibrant with blooms as it is in old postcards. Hunter said the catalyst for Prestwick’s revival was the opening by Buzzworks of a restaurant called Elliots in 2003; it now runs 21 bars and restaurants in the area. Colin Blair, the chairman of Buzzworks, told me that they wanted to see the Broadway restored ‘primarily because it will be good for the town and its residents. Of course, if the Broadway makes the Main Street more popular … if some of those who go to the cinema spend money in our premises, then it’s a win-win situation.’

That afternoon, I returned to the cinema. A few days earlier, trustees and supporters had gathered in the foyer for the official handover of the keys. I was being given a tour by Macfarlane and Guy Walker, chair of Friends of the Broadway and the cinema’s chief projectionist. Walker teaches at Heriot-Watt University, but for several years he was the projectionist at the Tivoli in Dorset, one of the first old cinemas to be restored, in 1993. ‘The gun shop next door had used the auditorium as a firing range,’ he told me. ‘Just think,’ Macfarlane whispered as we climbed up the secondary staircase (the grand staircase is still out of commission). ‘Everything you see from this point on has been hidden from the public for almost half a century.’ The balcony foyer had dark wood panelling, a wall ashtray (complete with old cigarette butts) and I could see the faded first line of the Burns couplet. The café, which will house a small museum, had green floral wallpaper, a mirrored clock, a dumb waiter and – a wonderful surprise – rows of raised golden pyramids below the cornicing.

A metal staircase led up to the projection booth. Macfarlane pointed out the marks caused by film cases banging against the wall as the projectionists struggled to navigate the narrow space. In the booth, the two projectors still stood facing the small glass portals, as though they might whirr into action at any moment. Two racks of old film reels stood next to a row of giant levers (to control the house lighting), and there was an internal phone with oversized receiver and an old record player with a broken LP of Les Baxter and his orchestra playing the theme tune from Helen of Troy.

Walker described the pleasing ritual involved in showing old films. ‘At the Tivoli, a funny little man in an old Austin Maestro van would drop off the reels, and I would lug them up the stairs,’ he told me. ‘Then I’d put on my white gloves and do a print inspection on the rewind bench before stitching it together with the splicing machines. It was all about presentation: getting the curtain movements spot-on, and the lighting fades and the music – all the tangible things that make a difference.’ He showed me the carbon rods used by the film projector. ‘The reason Lawrence of Arabia and The Sound of Music look so beautiful is that you have this carbon-arc light shining through a Technicolor film and you get all these rich skin tones.’

We climbed back down and went onto the balcony. The seats had been removed and the hulking frame of the squash courts below broke up the great sweep down to the proscenium. The auditorium – described on opening night as ‘stone and flame with flashes of red and blue’ – was now a lurid purple. But this didn’t detract from the thrill of seeing it, or of imagining what it could become.